With the development of computer technologies, a diversity of computer viruses has emerged. Viruses may do significant harms to computers, and may even cause breakdown of computers' operations. Therefore, antivirus software is installed on computers in order to protect the computers from such harms. Antivirus software checks whether computer files are infected with viruses according to virus signatures.
Virus signatures contained in antivirus software are obtained through a large number of virus samples, and the virus signatures are often analyzed manually by technical personnel. Manual analysis, however, involves large workload and is time-consuming. Accordingly, manual analysis may not be thorough enough to inclusively identify the latest virus signatures. As a result, antivirus software may miss out detecting some latest viruses within a certain period. In addition, manual analysis relies upon the experience of technical personnel, and variation in experience levels may not consistently be able to obtain optimal virus signatures. Therefore, the virus signatures obtained by manual analysis cannot cover a diversity of virus variants.